Jack's Halloween
by MrTax57
Summary: Jack finds out about a crime that he must solve himself.
1. Chapter 1

It was late in October and Jack had just finished a case that had taken up most of the month. There were subpoenas and motions and all sorts of paperwork that would make your head spin, but it was all part of the job of the ADA. Adam was almost satisfied, there had been some sort of justice, even if it was not perfect. The perp was given 10 – 15 years for grand larceny. The imperfect part was he was a family man 10 years after the fact and had to separated from his family. They were devastated and completely confounded by Jack's pursuit of justice at any cost.

After the trial Jack was so tired he didn't leave the office but fell asleep on the couch in the clothes he'd worn all day. During trials of this magnitude he rarely got a full nights sleep and pushed himself to the point of exhaustion.

Unconsciousness felt good as he fell deeper and deeper into sleep. The last thing he was thinking about was the trial, particularly the defendant and why he would make choices that would have such serious consequences._ Don't these people think ahead?_ He wondered.

He was standing in his office, thinking it was odd since he thought he just fell asleep. He had a desire to go outside. Down the hall to the elevator and down to the first floor, he walked to the front doors of the office building. Lenny met him before he got to the doors and gave him a piece of paper.

"You might want to check this out." Lenny said with his casual New York attitude.

Jack looked at the paper. There was an address on it. Walking down streets toward the address the sun seemed to travel across the sky rather quickly. By sunset he was standing in front of the address. Other than everything, something about this situation didn't feel right. Going into the building he had to find somebody named Jeff.

A door with the numbers 207 was in front of him. Jack knocked on it and it opened. A man was on the other side.

"Are you Jeff?" Jack asked.

The man nodded. In his hand was a piece of paper.

"This is all that's left." he said.

Jack took the paper and looked at it, it was an obituary for Jeffery Buntz. But the rest of the obituary was unconventional in that it had date of birth and date of death and how he died. Murdered by his Father-in-Law John Campbell.

Looking up he was in the middle of the street, it was night and there was no traffic at all. Making his way to the sidewalk he noticed that he wasn't even in the neighborhood of Mr. Buntz's building. But he was a few blocks away from his office building. Walking towards his office he began to think about what he had just experienced when he heard a sound nearby. It was a TV in a storefront with no window. Some sort of a newscast was on. Looking at his watch it was 3pm, _no news is on at_ _that time_, he thought. The story was about an unsolved murder and he caught the name of John Campbell. He still had the obituary in his hand and it still had the name of Jeffery Buntz.

Back in his office he looked at the couch and suddenly felt tired. As he lay down he thought it weird that nobody was in town today, must be a holiday he said to himself as he closed his eyes.


	2. Chapter 2

Jack woke up, again. But this time it was for real, he felt the couch beneath him and noticed the smell of the office. Opening his eyes he looked around, everything looked the same. He was finally sure he wasn't dreaming. Taking a deep breath he got up and looked for the clock in his office, it said 3 o'clock.

The light outside was dark so he concluded it was 3AM. But what day was it? He hoped he'd only been asleep for 9 hours. He'd never slept that long as long as he could remember. Looking around his office he hoped to find a newspaper that was still dated Friday the 30th of October and not Saturday the 31st.

He found a copy of the New York Times on his desk dated October 30th and breathed a sigh of relief. Then he also found something that he didn't expect, the strange obituary from his dream with the name Jeffery Buntz.

Jack was relieved and confused at the same time. Did he really leave the office and not know it? At first he thought it was a dream, but now he wasn't sure. All his life he was skeptical of these kinds of stories when he heard them. Wishful thinking, or a hyperactive imagination, he would say ti himself, no real proof to this paranormal stuff. But here he was looking at something he couldn't explain. One thing he knew for sure, nobody would believe him if he mentioned it to anyone. He didn't want the grief.

Sitting down at his desk he stared at the piece of paper not knowing what to do. For the time being going back to sleep wasn't an option, his mind was going a million miles an hour. So he got and moved to the couch to watch TV. Flipping through cable news channels he remembered something else from his dream, the TV broadcast he saw about John Campbell.

Jack got up and grabbed the piece of paper, looking at it he read the last few words; Jeffery Buntz was murdered by John Campbell 2003. But Buntzs' murder was unsolved in that there was no body found. It was a rare win for the prosecutions office, purely circumstantial. John had Jeff's blood on his clothes and they recovered a possible murder weapon, a candlestick holder. Jack remembered a funny feeling that day, he couldn't put his finger on it. Maybe this was it.

It was 3 in the morning but the prisons don't close. He put in a call to Riekers to inquire about John Campbell. After being on hold for about ten minutes Jack got the news he didn't expect. John had died earlier that night from injuries received in a prison fight. He hung up the phone with a muted thanks and remembered his dream when the man in room 207 said "This is all that's left." Confused and bewildered, Jack didn't know what to do or think. Sitting back down on the couch he realized he was very tired and laid down, within a minute he was asleep again.

Standing in front of an apartment building that he'd seen before he headed for the front door and made his way to number 207. He needed to know something. Needed to verify something. He wondered if the person he saw was familiar or not. Had he seen him before? If so, where?

The door with 207 on it opened and there stood the same man Jack had seen before. Standing with an empty expression, waiting for nothing waiting for something, just waiting.

"Where did you die, Mr. Buntz?" The words came out of Jack's mouth as matter-of-factly as they ever had. Jack wasen't even sure he moved his mouth.

"At a packing plant in Jersey." The expression remained blank, like it wasn't there at all. Jack looked at his face. It struck no chords of familiarity, no flashbacks to another setting, nothing.

A thought for another question came to mind, it made no sense, but then neither did this whole dream thing.

"Mr. Buntz, where is your body?" Jack didn't know what to expect.

"In several trash bags in a landfill in...Jack...Jack..."

He was just about to get something when he realized he was being woken up. Jack focused on Jeff's mouth hoping he could make out the shape of the word. Everything faded and he was back in his office, on his couch.


	3. Chapter 3

As he woke up, Jeff's face became Adam's. It's expression was concerned.

"You looked like you were having a bad dream." Standing up, his coat draped over his arm.

"I was having a dream, it wasn't good or bad." Sighing deeply he wondered if he should tell Adam. Neither one of them was ever given to that kind of thing. They both tended to scoff at psychic detectives when they heard of them. Sometimes they worked sometimes they didn't. They were unreliable, Jack and Adam saw them as a source of amusement and not much more. But now he felt conflicted because there was something going on with these dreams and they seemed a force to be reckoned with.

"Does it relate to a case?" Adam sat down in a nearby chair.

Jack sat up and looked at him. Then his eyes shifted from side to side like he was trying to figure something out.

"Yes, it does." Jack felt naked and vulnerable. He expected Adam to laugh at him and tell him to forget such foolishness.

For a second Adam just looked at him. Nothing in his expression betrayed any mockery.

"I had a dream once that lead to an overturned conviction, but no one knew the information came from a dream. When I collaborated the evidence with the dream then I told someone and went from there."

_A logical method _Jack thought and relaxed a bit.

"Well don't let it keep you up too much." Adam said as he walked out the door. "Enjoy the holiday."

"Halloween is a holiday, for whom?" Jack said to himself.

_Ghosts,_ The answer came back silently.

Seeing that it was morning and the sun was getting ready to rise Jack thought he'd been sleeping enough and had to get out of the office. Remembering the information from Riekers he wanted to go and check something out there. So he quickly headed over to his apartment to shower and change beforehand.

At Riekers Jack talked to a couple of guards and the warden about Campbell and learned nothing useful. Nobody remembers him saying anything significant relating to Jeff Buntz.

On the way back home Jack remembers an old friend who used to be in the department. Thinking about the dream before he was woken up, Jeff was saying something about a landfill. That made Jack think of his friend Ken Barber who during his tenure with the force seemed to find more bodies in landfills that anyone else. So he thought he'd call in a favor.

Ken looked at him in disbelief. "A landfill, after how many years?"

"Look," Jack said, trying to sound half-way intelligent, "I know it's a long shot, but there's something about this that I feel strongly about and I can't explain why."

"You been watching the psychic-friends network or something?" Ken began wondering about his friend. He'd heard lines like that before and noticed that only a small number of times did anything ever pan out. Just enough to notice and make you wonder what was going on. Most of the time the people saying things like this were at best misguided, at worst, bordering on insanity. In Ken's eye's Jack was one of the sanest people he knew, rarely misguided. This had to be worthwhile for him to take it this far.


End file.
